stodge wrote on Jun 6, 2021, 16:25:
Is there a way to delete my account on these forums?

Per the privacy policy your personal data can be erased. Mail the request to Blue.

SlimRam wrote on Jun 4, 2021, 00:03:
I heard this fuckin' place existed but have never actively sought it out!

With 1420+ posts in the News forum, you were in "the forums" all this time already.

RedEye9 wrote on May 24, 2021, 17:27:
Possible fix?
https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&boardid=1&threadid=222447&id=1314299

Already discussed but it'd be a workaround, not a real solution to the underlying problem.

jdreyer wrote on May 21, 2021, 18:17:
So what's next, will we be able to embed .jpgs?

If you can't express it in Unicode, it better not be expressed here at all.

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 25, 2021, 12:04:
Smillies still show through secret tags though....

Which may or may not be intentional

Both. The tag explicitly is for secret "text", and doesn't actively hide any text but merely renders it in the background color. The smilies are images and therefore cannot be hidden the same way, but also don't really fall under the meaning of text.

Kxmode wrote on Apr 2, 2021, 14:37:
Frans, could you add the stats link to the footer?

Could but won't. It's in the menu, and Blue and I feel it doesn't belong in the footer. Besides, if it were there, then by the same logic the credits & FAQ could go there as well, and that would be too much.

Acleacius wrote on Apr 2, 2021, 13:19:
That's some sleek and sexy coding Frans, what's your secret!

Thanks, no secret: the graph is done by simply feeding Chart.js with settings and data. The month picker took the most time, starting from an existing jQueryUI plugin and fixing/massaging it into shape. We can rebuild it, we have the source code, and it doesn't even cost 6 dollars.

Rhialto wrote on Apr 1, 2021, 13:01:
Yeah where is the pink theme to go along with new logo?

Some theming applied.

NBK_RedSpy wrote on Mar 25, 2021, 20:05:
but just curious why the site only updates at noon eastern.

Only? On weekdays there is a second update in the early evening. But that may be besides your point.

Bent wrote on Mar 18, 2021, 14:35:
Aha, the Contact Blue link gives an email address but the Submit News doesn't.

Send News (in the masthead) or Submit News (in the left menu) use a mailto link which opens a message window with a mail program (e.g. Thunderbird) where that address is already filled in.

I tried something that Google/Chrome is going to require in May, but it isn't quite ready for prime time here. It did reveal a minor configuration oversight on our end though, so that's fixed, but the other changes are postponed.

How many times do you all need reminding to not bury site questions/issues in a news forum thread, but raise them in General Discussions? A lot more times I guess...

Anyway...

Acleacius wrote on Mar 8, 2021, 13:53:
Still hoping one day, to be able to login and return to the intended page to post.-
If there is no current post in an article you want to post in. You login, then get stuck, have to return to the Bluesnews.com, and then back to the article page.

See here.

Acleacius wrote on Mar 8, 2021, 13:53:
Doing a Search, it would be nice to have a Page Count. -
I was trying to see if you already had posted the story of Kojima's exit after finding a decent story but had no idea how many pages I was going to be searching through.

Done, for both news and forums. Thanks, this was one of those little why-didn't-I-think-of-that-ten-years-ago tweaks.

RedEye9 wrote on Mar 8, 2021, 14:25:
"Return To Previous Page" does not appear after logging in on a news post that has zero comments.

That's because the browser already went through one redirect inside the scripts, so the Referer path of the original request is no longer available. Changing that would require something like passing that path in a &url= parameter throughout the login process, which looks fugly and is cumbersome in the code.

Simple user solutions: don't log out (the auto-login cookie keeps you logged in for a year).
Or open the User Settings/Login link from the masthead in a second tab to log in, then click on Post a Comment in the first tab. And stay logged in.

This comment was edited on Mar 10, 2021, 16:14.

Mr. Tact wrote on Feb 19, 2021, 14:29:
Frans to the rescue, again!

Nah, the Bluester returned and finished it himself.

Shock wrote on Feb 19, 2021, 13:15:
Logo hasn't changed for me. Still looks like Command & Conquer

Not just you, the Bluester forgot to rotate it and then apparently left the Blue Tower.

eRe4s3r wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 22:28:
Did you declare @charset "utf-8"; in the primary CSS and *SAVE* that .css file encoded in UTF-8 (with notepad++ or some other file editor that allows specifying..) ?

Since the style sheet contains no non-ASCII characters, that doesn't have any effect, but it doesn't hurt either.

eRe4s3r wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 22:28:
I dunno which CSS is loaded for NewBlue,

Hit Ctrl-U and look at line 12: <link href="/css/styles.css"...> Click it to view its contents.

fds wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 08:41:
Which version of MySQL is it? Older versions of MySQL, and all versions of MariaDB, required the use of their specially named "utf8mb4" character set instead for true utf-8, one that also supports 4-byte characters such as all emojis.

5.7, and yes I'm aware of the mb4 charset situation, but was hoping to avoid that. And the eacute is 2-bytes so I'd think the mb4 angle wouldn't explain the problem.

But the OS is due for a major LTS upgrade anyway, so I have some small hope that that might sort out the problem as yet, if it isn't a coding bug in our scripts.

fds wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 08:41:
Currently for me, your #2 link consistently serves the title of the story as Cyberpunk 2077 Expos0xE9, which is invalid utf-8, and as such, consistently shows broken. Both in the h2 posting title, and the top-level title tag which then ends up as the tab's title.

How did you determine the received byte(s), packet sniffing?

fds wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 08:41:
However, the issue is only on this /s/ "Share" link, which I gather was statically generated one time.

No, the only truly static page is the old HTML archive index (and 3 more that aren't relevant here). And as noted, the frontpage is a static .html file served via the switch script.

Share links have been shortened for SEO purposes, but are executed (via Apache rewrite) by the board.pl script, action viewstory. This shows replacement characters for me as well.

fds wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 08:41:
If I click over to the comment viewer board.pl version, it is always correct. It's served as a proper Cyberpunk 2077 Expos0xC3A9…

For title element and story header yes, but most comment subjects show ?'s for me. Although those come out of a separate table/column, and were copied from the news story header when that was still an incorrect 1-byte Latin1 version of eacute, thus the ?'s are to be expected.

fds wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 08:41:
If I had to guess, not all statically generated pages got refreshed after you have fixed whatever was borked in the perl settings earlier, and some corrupted static pages remain.

No, that's not it then.

But thanks for helping to investigate.

Frans wrote on Feb 6, 2021, 05:29:
I was going to add one more weird observation about the replacement characters, but since last night I'm not getting them anymore during dozens of refreshes in multiple browsers. So perhaps the issue resolved itself just as mysteriously as it popped up...

Wishful thinking... the replacement mark returned for me too (some days ago but I didn't have time for this until now).

The earlier observation is that in a browser's dev tools (F12) in the Network panel, one can view the response headers and body of the GET request for the URL with the problem. In that response body, the accented e is indeed shown as such in <title> tag and news post header, even when the browser's main window renders it as the replacement character in those spots. But the dev tools renderer may behave differently from the main window in this respect, so I'm not drawing conclusions, it merely contributes to the weirdness of the problem.

It's been pointed out multiple times before, but you folks shouldn't bring up and discuss site issues under a news post. A General Discussion topic already existed for it at the time of this story, and yesterday I added a comprehensive update there. One fix for the front-page should address the malformed characters there, another issue doesn't seem to occur anymore.

But if you still notice malformed characters, please report in the GD topic.

Frans wrote on Feb 5, 2021, 14:50:
But I don't know the reason nor remedy for this yet; it's really weird that the browser only renders UTF-8 characters correctly and consistently if they're 3-byte ones (and then the 2-byte ones too), but not if a page includes only 2-byte characters, given that HTML and HTTPS instruct it to use that character set.

Yes, a workaround remedy may be to insure that the page always includes a 3-byte character somewhere, but I'd still like to understand the underlying problem if possible.

I was going to add one more weird observation about the replacement characters, but since last night I'm not getting them anymore during dozens of refreshes in multiple browsers. So perhaps the issue resolved itself just as mysteriously as it popped up...